"On the Road" is a novel by the American writer Jack Kerouac. The book was written in 1951, and at a time when the manuscript was repeatedly rejected by publishers, Kerouac actively edited and supplemented the novel until its publication in 1957 by Viking Press.
"It was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about" ― Jack Kerouac
Despite the negative reaction from critics, the novel became a bestseller and brought Kerouac recognition as an author, subsequently establishing itself as a classic of American prose. The work, along with William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Allen Ginsberg's Howl, is considered the most important piece of beat generation literature. The novel is included in the lists of Time's 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005, Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, BBC's 200 Best Books, The Newest Library's 100 Best Novels and 100 greatest novels of all time "according to The Observer. By 2001, more than 3.5 million copies of the book had been sold in the United States; annual sales of the novel range from 110 to 130 thousand units.
The book tells the story of the travels of Jack Kerouac and his close friend, Neil Cassidy, across the United States of America and Mexico.
Neil Cassidy, the future hero of the book and a bosom friend of its author, spent most of his childhood with an alcoholic father in Denver, Colorado; From an early age, Neal begged for alms, collecting his parent for another bottle, and at fourteen he stole a car for the first time. By the age of eighteen, Neil decided to devote himself to poetry and philosophy and enter Columbia University, and after a while he was introduced to the young Jack Kerouac, with whom he quickly became friends. By the time he was twenty-one, Neal had 500 stolen cars, 10 arrests, 6 convictions and 15 months in prison. Neal wanted Jack to teach him how to write, and Jack wanted to learn how to live, and the two became bosom friends. Kerouac and Cassidy have made many journeys from one end of the continent to the other, on the way using drugs, drinking and reveling in the sounds of jazz on the radio. During these wanderings, Kerouac continually recorded their adventures. Many of these diary entries, later published in separate books, were word for word transferred to the pages of "On the Road".
These travels, like the friendship with Neal itself, later formed the basis of the novel, which was published a decade after the first notes made by Kerouac. The author has postponed further work on the book many times, working on other works; in particular, in parallel with "On the Road" Kerouac wrote the novels "Doctor Sachs" and "Town and City". And only when the latter was accepted for publication in 1949, the author returned to the postponed "On the Road". At the same time, Kerouac continued to work in various low-paid jobs to maintain his craving for travel (“for the next six years I was idle, I was a conductor, a sailor, a beggar, pretended to be an Indian in Mexico, in general, I was both "). In the early 1950s, before the publication of On the Road, Kerouac also created several works that have become typical examples of his prose - the novels Visions of Cody and Underground, and the novel Tristessa. At the same time, Kerouac became interested in Buddhism, which had a great influence on his work, especially noticeable in the book "Dharma Tramps". And at the same time, the latent pondering of the future novel continued, in Kerouac's diaries there were numerous variants of the name, which were moved and swept aside one after the other - "Souls on the Road", "Home and the Road", "At Night on the Road", "Love on the Road" , "Far along the wild road", and finally the final - the shortest and most capacious version - the current title.
The author finished the first version of "On the Road" in 1951 after three weeks of continuous work, typing 125 thousand words on a typewriter in 21 days. According to the stories of Kerouac himself, he was infuriated by the need to constantly insert blank sheets of paper into the typewriter. Then he glued together many sheets of Japanese paper and used the resulting 36-meter roll for continuous printing. Later, Kerouac called this method of work "spontaneous prose."
The greatest influence on the work was provided by Burroughs' novel "Junkie", the style of which Kerouac admired, having adopted it. Another book that greatly influenced Kerouac is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Journey to the Land of Heaven. In addition, Kerouac's desire to keep up with his friend John Holmes, who at that time had just finished his first "beat-novel" "Go", played a role.
You can get «On the Road» by Jack Kerouac on Amazon.
This article was sponsored by Peter Clive.
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